Live data from Hacker News

E2E encrypted messaging on Instagram will no longer be supported after 8 May

help.instagram.com

171–180 of 220 posts

Re: E2E encrypted messaging on Instagram will no longer be supported after 8 May

#171

The only reason I can think of for this change is governmental pressure. I don’t see how it benefits the platform itself (nor its users).

There is a product reason - AI features are fundamentally incompatible with E2EE. If they want to bring more AI generated experiences and content into Instagram then the data needs to be accessible by them.

Re: E2E encrypted messaging on Instagram will no longer be supported after 8 May

#172

Isn't this actually improving safety by openly admitting how things always were in practice? Any e2e encryption provided by the same entity who fully controls both the blackbox clients, and the server in between, is just a security theatre that they can selectively bypass anytime with very little risk of detection. Not really much better than simple client to server encryption. Truly safe e2e requires open source cli…

one thing to consider is how just the optics of major players using e2e was an overall benefit. people who otherwise would have gone their entire lives without ever hearing about encryption were exposed to the term and the marketing convinced them that encryption and privacy was a valuable thing, even if they didnt fully understand the mechanisms or why e2e might not necessarily be very effective in specific circumst…

And Big Brother realized this optics was a mistake.

Re: E2E encrypted messaging on Instagram will no longer be supported after 8 May

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also so employees of said companies can spy on drivers and make fun of them: https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sens...

Which just shows that consumers don't care. Tesla's camera surveillance wasn't exactly secret.

Customers care, but not enough to actually change purchasing patterns.

Re: E2E encrypted messaging on Instagram will no longer be supported after 8 May

#174
Everyone is hypothesizing government backdoors and whatever else but to me there's a simpler and more obvious reason - AI.

Companies started pushing E2EE a few years ago because users' private messaging data used to be a liability. Now that the data can be fed into LLMs for training and inference its value has gone up significantly, and the privacy and security tradeoffs are suddenly worthwhile.

PMs across the industry are pushing product decks with "conversational AI assistants" to get their next promotion. I've been in more than one of these meetings myself. If the data is encrypted then there's no way to build this kind of stuff.

Re: E2E encrypted messaging on Instagram will no longer be supported after 8 May

#176
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PR. They wanted to seem like the good guys, but they get your messages through backdoors like the automatic backup.

You're thinking of Apple. WhatsApp backups are not stored by Meta. Apple is the company that breaks their "end-to-end" encryption by backing up the encryption keys to their own servers.

You can opt-in to encrypting those backups so Apple have no access.

Re: E2E encrypted messaging on Instagram will no longer be supported after 8 May

#177
Just make it an OS feature. There’s no need for the application to know the exact contents. Other than search, but for most messaging and other apps the device can easily do indexing

Textbox with attribute ”encrypted”. Keys in the enclave/keychain.

Re: E2E encrypted messaging on Instagram will no longer be supported after 8 May

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also so employees of said companies can spy on drivers and make fun of them: https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sens...

Which just shows that consumers don't care. Tesla's camera surveillance wasn't exactly secret.

They care, but it is not in their top priorities

Re: E2E encrypted messaging on Instagram will no longer be supported after 8 May

#179

Isn't this actually improving safety by openly admitting how things always were in practice? Any e2e encryption provided by the same entity who fully controls both the blackbox clients, and the server in between, is just a security theatre that they can selectively bypass anytime with very little risk of detection. Not really much better than simple client to server encryption. Truly safe e2e requires open source cli…

One of the scary things is that not even this really works. Ignoring supply chain attacks, most people treat any client as effectively black box. When was the last time you read through the code of a messaging app? How do you know its safe? Maybe _you_ read through it, but 99% of people don't.

Re: E2E encrypted messaging on Instagram will no longer be supported after 8 May

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're thinking of Apple. WhatsApp backups are not stored by Meta. Apple is the company that breaks their "end-to-end" encryption by backing up the encryption keys to their own servers.

You can opt-in to encrypting those backups so Apple have no access.

Yes. I believe a small percentage of Apple users do this. Unfortunately that doesn't prevent Apple from reading your messages from the backups of the vast majority of people you correspond with.
Post reply on HN